The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  Bazalgette emerged from my research as not only an engineer of great skill but also a man of vision, a workaholic who, when given six months off to recover from the rigours of the London sewers project, managed only one before rushing back to the office. And yet, when I sought out his memorial in London, I found only a small bust set into a dark corner beneath the railway bridge at Charing Cross, on the Thames Embankment that he designed and built. Beneath the bust runs the Latin text flumini vincula posuit: he placed chains upon the river. For the brilliance with which he pioneered systems copied subsequently throughout the world, he deserves much more.

  One of the men who was later to implement Bazalgette's ideas in other cities was Robert Rawlinson, to whom I have also given a walk-on role in the book. Rawlinson was not the Commission's most senior engineer but remained in Turkey when the Commission's chairman, John Sutherland, returned to England to ensure that the necessary sanitary reforms were carried out. Rawlinson had stood against Bazalgette for the post of Chief Engineer to the Board of Works in 1851 but remained a close friend and ally of Bazalgette's for the remainder of his life.

  By contrast, the researcher finds very few extant accounts of men of the status of William May, those who executed the ideas and instructions of other, greater men. However the diaries of H. Percy Boulnois, Reminiscences of a Municipal Engineer, gave me something of an insight into the precarious livelihoods of ordinary men. There is even less evidence of incidences of self-harm, which I took to reflect the taboo nature of the subject. The only example I was able to track down was the story of a woman, incarcerated in Bedlam, who regularly broke her windows and used the shards of glass to cut herself. Her guards commented that she failed to kill herself because she did not cut deeply enough or in the right places, attributing this to her derangement. To me it was evidence that they had quite failed to understand her intent. Throughout history the letting of blood has been a ritual of purification, a cleansing of a body fouled by sin or by disease. Modern-day accounts by self-harmers, such as those included in Marilee Strong's A Bright Red Scream, speak to the intense human pain that drives its sufferers to such extremities.

  Any study of Britain in the mid-nineteenth century cannot fail to include the Russian War, fought between 1854 and 1856. Although it began as a religious quarrel between Russian Orthodox monks and French Catholics over precedence in the holy cities of Jerusalem and Nazareth, the Crimean War, as it was later to become known, was sparked when the Russians invaded part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. Alarmed that they would take Constantinople and cut off routes to India, a vital part of the British Empire, the British agreed to join with the French and the Turks to eject Russia from the region. The conflict was Britain's only European war between the ending of the Napoleonic conflict in 1815 and the opening of the Great War in 1914, and quickly became a byword for poor generalship and logistical incompetence.

  It was from the outset a conflict of appalling losses, first to cholera (ten thousand Allied soldiers died before the first shot of the war was fired) and then during a series of chaotically mismanaged encounters with the enemy. The battle of Inkerman, in which William sustains his wounds, began when the Russians invaded the British camp early one foggy morning while most of the men were still asleep; the battle that followed was a ramshackle affair fought with bayonets at extremely close quarters.

  The Victorians were not ones for emotional analysis but, to a modern sensibility, it is all too easy to imagine the terrible psychological damage sustained by the young men who fought there. One nurse mentioned briefly in her journal that many junior soldiers 'became imbecile and it was believed that this affliction was often caused by fright'. Many more were invalided home with the loose diagnosis of 'low fever,' Victorian code for depression. On returning to London, there must have been many who found that the repressive certainties of Victorian society, the rigid definitions of what it meant to be a respectable Christian and gentleman, demanded so much of them that they were forced to act, in secret, in desperate and drastic ways.

  As for Long Arm Tom, he walked almost whole from between the pages of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. As the London correspondent for a large-scale survey of Britain's working poor, sponsored by the Morning Chronicle newspaper, Mayhew's unflinching reports upon the lives of London's poorest citizens were shocking and controversial. Unlike most Victorians, who approached the poor in the guise of moralists and missionaries, Mayhew interviewed the occupants of London's grimmest slums directly, reporting their speech verbatim and providing clear and impartial accounts of what they wore, how they lived, and how they scraped together a living. He talked to prostitutes and costermongers, toshers and street sweepers and flower girls, to all the vast ranks of the disregarded and the dispossessed, and his efforts have furnished the historian with what is arguably the finest oral history of his period.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While the historical events upon which this book is based are true, and a handful of real people have walk-on parts, William and Tom, and the story that connects them, are fictional. Any errors of fact are entirely my own.

  I have plundered innumerable books for both information and inspiration but particular tribute must go to Henry Mayhew's seminal work, London Labour and the London Poor (1851), from between whose pages so many of this book's characters have emerged. John Hollingshead's wonderful Underground London (1862) proved equally indispensable, as did Hippolyte Taine's Notes on England (1872) and Sala's Gaslight and Daylight (1859). Other more contemporary but similarly invaluable sources include Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography (2000), A. N. Wilson's The Victorians (2001) and Eric de Maré's The London Doré Saw: A Victorian Evocation (1972).

  For information about the work of Joseph Bazalgette I am indebted to both Stephen Halliday's The Great Stink of London (1999) and Trench and Hillman's London Under London (1984), as well as many contemporary accounts, notably H. Percy Boulnois's Reminiscences of a Municipal Engineer (1920). I would also like to thank the staff of the local history section of Battersea Lending Library for allowing me access to their extensive collection of minutes from the meetings of the Municipal Board of Works.

  In all matters concerning the Russian War I could have found no better sources than Paul Kerr's The Crimean War (1997) and John Shepherd's study of the medical aspects of the conflict, The Crimean Doctors (1990). I relied heavily upon The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe (1989), by Marjorie Blarney and Christopher Grey-Wilson, for botanical detail. And I would have had only a fraction of the insight required for this book without Marilee Strong's remarkable study of self-injury, A Bright Red Scream (1998).

  There are also large numbers of people without whose hard work and unstinting support this book would never have been written. Specific thanks go to Clare Alexander, my wonderful agent and friend whose idea it was in the first place, and Mary Mount, my brilliant editor, and all of her team at Penguin, not to mention Sally Riley, Susan Miles, and the indefatigable staff at Battersea Library, Chelsea Library, and the British Library. I also want to thank Jill Sterry and her colleagues at Thames Water who provided me with first-hand experience of a London sewer.

  Most of all I want to thank my children, Charlie and Flora, for sharing me so uncomplainingly with my laptop, and my husband, Chris, without whom it would hardly be worth getting up in the morning.

  1

  THE ROOM WAS DARK. In the gloom it was possible to make out a three-legged stool leaning drunkenly against a wall and, on an ancient tea chest, an unlit stub of candle jammed in a ginger beer bottle. Otherwise it was bare, save for a heaped-up pile of sacks and dirty straw on which a small child was sleeping. His elbows poked through the holes in his shirt and the soles of his bare feet were black. Above him the ceiling was criss-crossed with sagging lines of laundry.

  The silence was thick, constricted, as though the room held its breath. Then, very slowly, a hand insinuated itself between the tatters on the washing line and a dark figure lea
ked into the room. His face was obscured by a greasy wide-brimmed hat, its shallow crown dented and scuffed. His shoulders were stooped, his whiskers wild and grey. Instead of a coat, he wore a grimy flannel gown that trailed its frayed hem along the floor. He glanced around him, his eyes flickering from side to side, before, silent as syrup, he slunk across the room, his fingers dancing before his face as though he counted coal smuts in the air.

  Beside the tea chest he hesitated, fumbling in his pockets. There was the rattle of a matchbox and then the scrape and flare of a match. Shadows leaped from behind the lines of laundry as he lifted the candle to his face. Beneath the snarl of his eyebrows his sharp eyes flickered like a snake”s. As for his nose, it swept from his face like the buttress of a great abbey, the hook arching away from between his eyes before curving in a wide arc towards its tip, a point so sharp it might, if dipped in ink, have done duty for a nib. Although the bridge was narrow, the fleshy parts of the nose around the nostrils appeared almost swollen, rising from his cheeks like tumours, the nostrils beneath slicing the polyps in two thick black lines. His skin was a sickening grey.

  The old man reached into the straw and pulled out a small brass-cornered chest. Unlocking it with a key on a string around his neck, he raised the lid. For a moment he simply stared. Then, plunging his hands inside, he drew out handfuls of treasure, bringing them up to his titanic nose as though he might inhale them, the glistening chains of gold, the vivid jewels in scarlet and chartreuse and cerulean, the milky ropes of pearls.

  Immediately there was a commotion from behind the washing lines. The sleeping child started up in fright. Scrambling to his feet, he ducked beneath the laundry and was gone. Before the old man could scrabble his treasures back into the chest there emerged from behind the curtain of laundry a strange lopsided beast. Its back was humped, its white face crowned with curled horns. Emitting a strangled bleat the beast raised its hoof and jabbed it towards the old man, who cringed, the backs of his hands pressed to his eyes. The creature wheeled around, the sharpness of the manoeuvre almost breaking its back in two, and buried its face in the laundry.

  A footman entered the room. Resplendent in scarlet livery and a white wig, he snapped his fingers at the old man, who grudgingly surrendered his treasure. The fanfare of a lone trumpet sounded as a small round lady made her stately entrance. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun and topped with a large golden crown that threatened to slip over one eye. Pinned to the blue silk sash that she wore over one shoulder was a gold brooch as big as her fist. Though unnaturally small for a lady of her advanced years, her substantial girth coupled with the imperiousness of her expression more than made up for any deficiency of stature and she brandished her sceptre as though it were a bludgeon. The footman bowed. There was no mistaking her. It was without question the Empress of India, Her Majesty Queen Victoria herself.

  The old man whispered something to the footman. Hurriedly he stepped forward and presented the treasure chest to the Queen. She received it with stately froideur. Then, unable to contain her glee, she grinned at the villainous old man. He winked at her and blew out the candle.

  Abruptly the darkened room was filled with light. The Queen curtsied, her skirts held wide. Then she clapped her hands.

  “Well?” she demanded, jumping up and down. “Can you guess?”

  Maribel glanced over at Edward as the Charterhouse children began excitedly to shout suggestions. He stood with one elbow propped on the corner of the mantelpiece and one long leg crossed over the other, a faint smile on his lips. Behind him a housemaid quietly drew back the curtains. The weather had not improved. The wind rattled the window sashes, sweeping the rain across the terrace in veils. Beyond the lawn the sodden trees huddled together like cattle.

  “Treasure? Chest? Hide? Steal?”

  “Gold!”

  “No, look, he”s pointing at himself. It”s him. The first syllable is him.”

  “Old man?”

  “Thief ?”

  “Crook?”

  “We”re getting warmer. A particular crook, then.”

  Charades had been Arthur”s idea, of course. Ordinarily, released from the strictures of their London lives, his children behaved at Oakwood like animals returned to the wild, coming into the house only to eat and to sleep, but it had been a miserable Easter, the wettest anyone could remember. Confined indoors, they had relied heavily upon their father”s passion for parlour games. In the afternoons, when in other years there might have been croquet or riding or an outing to the beach at Cooden, Arthur gathered the entire party together in the drawing room for frenzied contests of Hunt the Slipper and Blind Man”s Buff.

  Several of his games were so outlandish that Maribel could only assume that he invented them on the spot. The previous day, the party swelled by several neighbouring families invited for luncheon, he had insisted upon playing something he called Poor Pussy, in which one of the players was required to crawl on all fours among the assembled company, miaowing piteously. The other participants were then obliged to declare “Poor Pussy!” with the gravest of expressions. Any player whose mouth so much as twitched was seized upon immediately and set in turn on their hands and knees. The Charterhouse children had demonstrated an alarming aptitude for the sport and had frowned grimly at one grovelling victim after another, until Arthur in a fit of impatience had taken it upon himself to be Pussy and had wound himself around his children”s legs, rubbing his head against them and purring with the combustive power of a steam engine until they wept with mirth.

  “So like Fagin but not Fagin.”

  “He”s pointing at his nose.”

  “Nose?”

  “Hook?”

  “Jew?”

  “Jew is right!”

  “Jew? That”s the word?”

  “Not the whole word, you silly. The first syllable.”

  “How many sybabbles are there?”

  “Three, of course. Don”t you ever listen?”

  “Not to you or I”d die of boredom.”

  From across the room Edward caught her eye and smiled. Maribel smiled back and straight away she thought again of the letter hidden in her writing box and the smile tightened over her teeth. To distract herself she fumbled in her bag for her cigarette case. Edward had bought it for her in Mexico City just after they were married. The soft silver was scratched now, the initials on the small raised plaque at its centre almost rubbed away.

  She struck a match and inhaled, sucking in the shock of the harsh Egyptian tobacco. Beside her on the chesterfield little Matilda wriggled restlessly, pressing her small fingers into the buttoned cavities of the upholstery. Arthur disapproved of Maribel smoking, of course, but then she disapproved of charades, and Arthur had never paid the slightest heed to that. In Arthur”s world only fast women smoked.

  “What words begin with Jew?”

  “Juice. Juice begins with Jew.”

  “Juice is only one syllable, silly.”

  “Don”t call me silly! Mama, he called me silly.”

  “Sneak.”

  “Now he called me a sneak!”

  “Hush now, both of you,” Charlotte soothed. She held out her hand to Kitty, who glared at her brother before crawling triumphantly into her mother”s lap. “Let”s think. What other words begin with Jew?”

  “Jupiter?”

  “Juvenile delinquent?”

  “Judica.”

  “Jew-what?”

  “Judica,” thirteen-year-old George repeated, rolling his eyes. “Passion Sunday to you ignorami.”

  George had only been at Eton half a year but already he had learned enough disdain for a lifetime. Bertie, who was to join him the following year, stuck out his tongue behind his brother”s back.

  “It”s not that, is it, Papa?” Kitty asked.

  The old man shook his head firmly. His nose wobbled.

  “Of course not,” he said. “It”s a word you all know.”

  “Papa!” Queen Victoria hissed, poking a finger into h
is ribs. “You”re not supposed to talk.”

  The old man gurned guiltily, clamping his lips between thumb and forefinger. The children laughed. Beside Maribel Matilda squirmed. Then she tugged at Maribel”s sleeve. There were dimples at the bases of her fingers where the knuckles should have been.

  “I”m four,” the little girl whispered confidingly.

  “Goodness,” Maribel murmured. Her accent was neither French nor Spanish but a husky tangle of the two that a certain type of Englishman found irresistible. “Very nearly grown up.”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  Matilda looked thoughtful.

  “Are you seven?” she asked.

  Maribel smiled distractedly. The letter had come that morning. Alice, their maid, had had the post sent on to Sussex from Cadogan Mansions and, as she had every morning, Maribel had flicked through it idly in the breakfast room, her only thought a faint hope that the milliner had not remembered her bill. The shock of the familiar handwriting on the envelope had caused her to spill her tea on the tablecloth. Arthur had called her a butterfingers and had the maid bring an infant mug with a spout.

  “What came after the Nose Man?” Kitty asked her mother.

  “That animal, wasn”t it?”